Ashley Smith-Robinson sits in her car on a recent muggy morning outside a child care center in North Augusta, South Carolina, and can not help but marvel at the “pretty normal” path her life has taken over the last two decades.
“I am grateful for where I am now,” the 49-year-old says, as she waits to pick up her 11-month-old grandson Cash. “It is been better than I could have ever imagined or deserve.”
Ashley was first introduced to the world in March 2005, when she was kidnapped in her apartment by an alleged rapist who eluded police and killed four people.
Over the course of seven hours, Ashley, who had lost custody of her daughter Paige while trying to kick drugs and get her life back on track, used her deep Christian faith and determination to see her little girl to pull off what was widely regarded as a miracle: She convinced 33-year-old Brian Nichols to release her and turn himself in, potentially saving countless other lives.
Ashley’s nightmare proved to be pivotal. Not only did she write the 2005 memoir Unlikely Angel and star in the 2015 film Captive, but she also never used drugs again, regained custody of her daughter, and built the “quiet life” that once seemed impossible. In a way, she is grateful for everything.
“If this had never happened,” admits Ashley, a happily married mother of three and new grandmother, “there is no doubt in my mind I would be dead from an overdose or from getting involved with the wrong people.”
Ashley was still reeling from her husband Mack’s murder in front of her in 2001, and she was using meth to cope when Nichols arrived at her Atlanta-area apartment with a gun at 2 a.m. on March 12, 2005.
“I was in a bad place,” admits Ashley, who had relapsed after 10 months of sobriety.
For much of the previous day, the city was on edge after Nichols overpowered a sheriff’s deputy at the Fulton County courthouse and went on a rampage, killing judge Rowland Barnes, 64; court reporter Julie Brandau, 46; deputy Hoyt Teasley, 43; and 40-year-old off-duty ICE agent David Wilhelm.
Ashley had seen the drama unfold on television earlier that afternoon while working as a waitress. “Do not worry about him,” she recalls a group of police officers at the restaurant telling her when she inquired whether Nichols had been apprehended. “He is probably in Alabama by now.”
Hours after finishing her shift, she was back at her new apartment, unpacking boxes and deciding to drive to a nearby gas station for a pack of cigarettes.
Something about the truck parked in front of her complex with someone inside seemed “weird,” she recalls thinking. She returned minutes later, and it was still there.
Ashley was walking towards her front door when she heard footsteps behind her. When she turned around, she noticed a man standing behind her, pointing a gun at her. “I will not hurt you,” said the man, who Ashley recognized as Nichols when he removed his hat. “If you do everything I say.”
With every ounce of composure she could muster, she told Nichols, a former college football player, about her own life, including how she was scheduled to see her then-5-year-old daughter the next morning.
She began asking him questions about himself on instinct, hoping to get to know him better.
“He sounded crazy and felt extremely judged — which was how I was feeling at that point in my life,” said Ashley. “So I tried to talk to him about all the things I would want people to ask me to make him feel a little more human.”
Nichols eventually asked her if she had any marijuana. She told him no, but she had some meth and soon found herself laying out lines of the drug on a table and reflecting on “the mess I would made of my life.”
Nichols asked if she wanted some. “I told him that I never want to use drugs ever again,” she says.
After seeing him snort the meth, which had a strangely calming effect on Nichols, she changed the tone of their conversation. “I just started praying and having a spiritual conversation with him,” says Ashley, who, after making Nichols pancakes, began reading to him from The Purpose Driven Life, a book she had recently found helpful.
As Nichols listened to Ashley read from Chapter 33 of the book, he asked her, “What do you think I should do?”
Without missing a beat, she responded: “You must turn yourself in. We all have to pay for our mistakes, and I am paying for mine right now because I do not have my daughter. “It is one of the most painful things I have ever experienced.”
Hours later, as the sky brightened into the morning, her words of tough love had clearly worked. Nichols asked her what time she needed to leave to see her daughter. She looked at her watch and told him, “Now would be the best time.”
Nichols nodded, fished her cellphone from his pocket, and returned it to her. Ashley exited her front door a few moments later.
“My knees were shaking,” she writes, “and I immediately said, ‘Thank you Lord.'”
She jumped into her car and sped away, immediately calling the police. Nichols remained in her apartment to calmly await the officers, even hanging a mirror, before SWAT teams descended on the complex and handcuffed him.
Ashley’s life became a whirlwind over the next few years. She was hailed a hero for recapturing Nichols, who is now serving multiple life sentences at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification State Prison. She later shared how her faith saved her life with Oprah Winfrey and audiences of thousands.
She became sober again, went back to school to become an X-ray and CT technician, and married her ex-boyfriend Daniel Robinson in 2007.
Since then, she has largely withdrawn from the public eye, but she continues to appear as a local inspirational speaker.
She has had no contact with Nichols since that morning 20 years ago. But every few years, she says, “God will press it on my heart to write him a letter, and then I will get four sentences into it and say, ‘Not now.'” “It does not feel right.”
Candy Wilhelm, the widow of ICE agent David, whom Nichols killed hours after fleeing the Atlanta courthouse in 2005, is someone Ashley has kept in regular contact with since that tragedy.
“She and I have a relationship because she knows that I know what it feels like to have your husband taken away from you,” she explains.” “That is our bonding point.”
Although Ashley admits that her encounter with terror “seems like a lifetime ago,” she can not help but feel uneasy at home alone. And the impact of her excruciating night in captivity is still profound — but also painfully bittersweet.
“Four people died. “Families lost husbands, wives, and fathers,” Ashley says. “But it gave my children a mother, it gave my husband a wife, and it gave me an opportunity to share God’s love with millions of people.”